Based on a unique set of data, Persson dicussed the selection into higher political office in Sweden. The two lectures addressed the following questions;

Can the selection of politicians combine high competence (ability) with an equal representation of different social backgrounds?

Do political parties consider candidates' popularity among the voters when appointing their leaders? How will a quota to raise the female representation in politics change the competence of elected politicians?

Candidates for the British Parliament and the U.S. Congress are elected according to plurality rule (first-past-the-post). I will argue that this election method is seriously flawed. A better method is “true majority rule” (the Condorcet Method), according to which a candidate wins if she would beat all other candidates in a head-to-head contest. Indeed, there is a sense in which true majority rule dominates all others. Slides

Part II: Elections and Strategic Voting

Strategic voting consists of voting for candidate A even though you prefer candidate B. Election methods that are vulnerable to strategic voting produce distorted outcomes and impose heavy extra costs on voters. No method is entirely strategy proof, but I will argue that the election rules proposed by two rival 18th century scientists---Condorcet and Borda---come closest. Slides

Intellectual Property and Public Policy

One of the key markets in our knowledge economy is the market for intellectual property. The future of several industries hinges on public policy with regards to patent granting and licensing, copyright, trade secrets, open source solutions and standard setting. How can we stimulate widespread technology diffusion and reward only truly innovative contributions? In particular, public policy confronts two major issues concerning the diffusion and sharing of intellectual property.

First, new technologies tend to be covered by a wide array of patents issued to the different firms that contribute components to the technology. This patent thicket is conducive to “royalty stacking”, threatening the diffusion of the technology. It has accordingly been proposed that antitrust authorities stop discouraging patent pools, which are institutions through which owners of different pieces of intellectual property jointly market their licenses. Patent pools dominated the industrial world until an adverse landmark decision of the US Supreme Court in 1945, and now are making an impressive comeback in high tech industries. Patent pools, if poorly structured, however can be strongly anticompetitive. The lectures will discuss public policies toward patent pools and more generally co-marketing arrangements among potential competitors.

Second, when standardization is necessary, in many cases there are multiple routes to solving a given technological problem. Each one of these may be equally viable, but often a standards body will choose only one avenue. After the decision is made, however, the chosen patent becomes a “standard-essential patent,” and the patent owner can ask for a high royalty even when other patents could have offered comparable value, had the technology been morphed differently. Standard essential patents have motivated for instance the ongoing disputes over smartphone patents. The lectures will discuss whether the standard-setting process should be regulated and how. Finally, the lectures will discuss various other issues regarding the future of intellectual property policy.

The lecture covered recent advance in the analysis of matching models under transferable or imperfectly transferable utility. Emphasis will be put, in particular, on multidimensional models and on econometric aspects.

The acclaimed economist, Professor Jerry Hausman from MIT, Massachusetts will be presenting the Gorman Lectures in Economics 2011. These annual lectures are sponsored by Princeton University Press and are in honour of Terence Gorman, a distinguished economist of the 20th Century.

The subject of the lectures this year will be 'Heterogeneity, Consumer Behaviour and Welfare'.

They will take place on Wednesday 30th November and Thursday 1st DecemberFlyer

Robert Townsend (MIT) presented the Gorman Lectures in Economics 2010, sponsored by Princeton University Press. This annual lecture is in honour of Terence Gorman, a distinguished economist of the 20th Century.